In a world with an intellectual history of seven thousand years behind it, where do Pakistanis stand, what are they doing, what do they aspire to be, and what ought they to be doing? This Blog takes Notes of all of that ...

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Plato’s dark forecast about Democracy without Rule of Law

Plato knew well democracy without rule of law in Pakistan
will be dominated by demagogues, chaos will ensue, to reestablish order, the
people will welcome tyrant, and tyranny will give to other evils!

See
this article which appeared in The New York Times on September 11, 2013:

Democracy
as chimera

The
news from Egypt confirms Plato’s dark forecast about democracy. Early this
month the ruling junta in Cairo arrested a labor lawyer and a
journalist, raising concerns that the regime’s repression now targets not just
Islamists but also secular critics.

As
Plato warned, extreme freedom risks extreme slavery. He predicted that
democracy — “people rule” — will quickly be dominated by demagogues. Chaos will
ensue. To reestablish order, the people will welcome a tyrant. Tyranny will
give birth to other evils.

One
of America’s leading specialists on the Arab world, the late Ambassador Hermann
F. Eilts, agreed with Plato. Having helped mediate the Camp David accord
between Egypt and Israel in 1978, Eilts became a professor at Boston
University. Before his death in 2006, Eilts often shared with me his misgivings
about official U.S. support for “democracy.” Serving in many posts throughout
the Islamic world — in Iran and Bangladesh as well as in Yemen, Saudi Arabia,
Libya (Muammar el-Qaddafi wanted to kill him) and Egypt, Eilts saw up close the
pitfalls of authoritarian rule.

[From The New York Times]

He
disliked Washington’s penchant for bribing dictators and for compelling
recipients of “aid” programs to buy food, tools and planes made in the United
States. Still, Eilts foresaw that “democracy” without the rule of law and
respect for minority rights could lead to troubles like those forecast by
Plato.

Representative
government demands far more than formalities. Hermann Eilts’s father left the
German diplomatic corps and moved to Pennsylvania just a few years before 1933,
when Germany’s president, elected in a multiparty contest, appointed Adolf
Hitler chancellor of Germany, expecting him to lead a short-term coalition
government.

Hitler
quickly changed everything. To gain power, he used and abused the country’s Weimar
Constitution, established in 1919 — “the most liberal and democratic document
of its kind the twentieth century had seen,” according to William Shirer’s “The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

Why
then did democracy collapse in Germany and prove short-lived in Egypt?
Political malaise is often the product of the prevailing political culture,
especially when a country is buffeted by cruel events. Weimar Germany, like
Egypt today, was polarized. Left-wing parties fought both liberal and rightist
forces. Their struggles, sharpened by worldwide Depression, produced a
stalemate at the polls that helped Hitler to neuter democracy.

Egypt
too is deeply split. For decades the Muslim Brotherhood was the only organized
force resisting authoritarian rule. Banned from formal political life, it
nevertheless enlisted millions of supporters. When Tahrir Square protesters
managed to oust Hosni Mubarak from the presidency in 2011, many
Egyptians wanted a secular democracy. But the secular groups had no political
machine ready for action like the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate, Mohamed
Morsi, emerged as the new president.

Like
Hitler in 1933-1934, Morsi then acted to create a totalitarian dictatorship.
Following weeks of protests, Morsi was unseated on July 3 by a
council led by the defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the liberal
leader Mohamed ElBaradei, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed El-Tayeb, and the
Coptic pope, Tawadros II. Soon, General Sisi directed a crackdown against all
opponents.

As
Plato might well have expected, politics in Egypt has gone from bad to worse —
from a moderate dictatorship to an elected but ideologically driven dictatorship
to a much more violent and intolerant dictatorship. U.S. officials have been
torn between concerns for stability and for self-rule. Washington usually
offered its official friendship (plus more than $1 billion in aid each
year since 1979) to whoever ruled Egypt. But it has also applauded each move —
real or apparent — toward democracy, with very little to show for it.

See
the full story which published first in the New York Times, and a version of
this op-ed appeared in print on September 11, 2013, in The International
Herald Tribune:

The Blogger

The blogger cherishes a cosmopolitan spirit; he is a moralist; a rationalist; a philosopher; a political philosopher; he believes in Classical Liberalism, as a Theory of Conduct.
He has substantially contributed to the founding of the first free market think tank of Pakistan, Alternate Solutions Institute.
He is a writer who wrote / published dozens of articles on a variety of issues, and is author of 4 books.
He wrote / published short-stories in Punjabi, a regional language of Pakistan.
He composes poetry both in Urdu and Punjabi, and has already published one collection.